After a Fraught Election, Questions Over the Impact of a Balky Voting Process

So few Americans cast ballots that a new president was elected by barely a quarter of Americans eligible to vote. Some of those who did vote waited in line for hours. Others were told they needed an ID to vote under a law the courts had nullified months ago — and sometimes, under laws that never existed to begin with.

Amid the ruins of the ugliest presidential campaign in modern history, Democrats are bemoaning an election apparatus so balky and politically malleable that throngs of would-be voters either gave up trying to cast ballots or cast ones that were never counted.

This was the first presidential election in a half century that was held without the full protection of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Voting rights advocates spent the year in court battling, with incomplete success, to roll back restrictions on the franchise enacted by Republican legislatures in state after state.

Some scholars and election analysts questioned this week whether a better run and less politically influenced voting process might have changed the outcome in some close races and made the presidential contest even closer.

The headline example is Wisconsin, where a Republican-backed law requiring voters to produce one of a limited number of acceptable photo IDs was in effect for the first time. Studies show — and some Republicans admit — that such laws disproportionately reduce Democratic turnout because many of the laws require IDs that low-income and immigrant voters, who are often Democrats, frequently lack.

In Milwaukee, where turnout dropped 41,000 votes from the 2012 total, the chief elections official said on Friday that declines in voting were greatest in areas where lack of IDs was most common. Donald J. Trump won Wisconsin by about 27,000 votes.

No conclusion can be drawn on the impact of the ID requirement until voting data is analyzed, said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at the University of Chicago and an election law expert. But “it’s at least a reasonable hypothesis that voting restrictions made a major difference in places like Wisconsin,” he said.

Others said they remained skeptical until election data could be sifted. Some of the strictest voter-identification laws that Republican legislatures had enacted were struck down by courts before balloting began, they noted, and support forHillary Clinton declined across the board from 2012 levels, not just in states with stricter voter ID requirements.

“With their election debacle, Democrats are looking for a scapegoat,” said Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and a leading election scholar. “And as much as I am upset with the efforts of Republican legislatures to make it harder to register and vote, I don’t think that’s the primary explanation for the Democrats’ failure at the top of the ticket.”

There is nevertheless broad agreement that the electoral system failed large numbers of would-be voters this year, and substantial doubt that many of those failings will be remedied anytime soon.

Detailed autopsies of Tuesday’s vote will not be available for weeks. But not counting the effects of politically driven voter suppression, experts believe about one million votes are not cast or are thrown out in an average presidential election through no fault of the voter, said Charles Stewart III, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Stewart is a member of the Caltech/M.I.T. Voting Technology Project, which researches election administration.

Some of those lost votes resulted from electronic or mechanical lapses that misread or lost ballots. But other factors are also at work. Estimates of the number of voters who were deterred by long lines and lengthy waits ranged as high as 730,000 in 2012, and a study by the Ohio State University and The Orlando Sentinel estimated that 200,000 people left lines in Florida alone that year.

Image

Voters waited to cast their ballots in Phoenixville, Pa., on Tuesday. This week’s election saw long lines in crucial states.CreditMark Makela for The New York Times

Tuesday’s election brought long lines to a number of crucial states, including Ohio, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Computer failures in Colorado, North Carolina and elsewhere caused delays in casting votes; in Durham, N.C., a breakdown of electronic voter registration rolls caused huge delays, witnesses said.

About 250,000 of the 26.8 million absentee ballots cast in 2012 were thrown out because voters failed to follow often arcane instructions on filling in and sealing their vote. One in six of the thrown-out votes that year was tossed because a ballot signature was deemed to not match those on registration documents, a flaw most experts attribute to mistakes or handwriting changes, not fraud.

Tuesday’s election likely saw a surge in provisional ballots — those cast but held in abeyance until their eligibility can be verified — as election-law changes in some states left voters and poll workers alike confused about requirements. Some of those ballots will not be counted because voters failed to follow up after the election to correct some deficiency, like the lack of a required ID card.

“Voters see the outcome and think, ‘My vote won’t matter,’” said Barry C. Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “And even if the voter wants his vote to count, it’s still a hassle. You have to take another step that other voters don’t have to.”

Some of those shortcomings could be addressed before the next presidential balloting. After the 2012 election, a presidential task force recommended that states replace voting machines that were purchased after the disputed 2000 vote, which are nearing the end of their useful life.

One early test is whether Congress will allot money for that upgrade, a task that is far down the list of priorities for cash-strapped states and localities. That could reduce both the number of lost and misread ballots and the long lines caused by equipment failures.

But the outlook for perhaps the most significant change — removing the political and bureaucratic obstacles that dilute the vote — is decidedly more mixed in the wake of this week’s Republican sweep of power.

Voting rights advocates persuaded federal appeals courts to strike down restrictive laws in North Carolina, Texas and elsewhere as violations of both the Constitution and what remains of the Voting Rights Act. Those suits are now headed to the Supreme Court, where they are far more likely to be struck down if Mr. Trump nominates a conservative justice to fill the seat left by Antonin Scalia.

Still, those who anticipate a rollback of voting rights protections may be mistaken, said Edward B. Foley, a law professor and director of the election law project at Ohio State University. In recent rulings, even conservative judges have drawn the line at voter ID requirements and other restrictions that were clearly discriminatory, he said, and new academic studies have done far more to document the effects of those restrictions than in the past.

“I don’t think the sky is going to completely fall on voting rights,” Professor Foley said. “My instinct is that the system is going to essentially protect voters from outright disenfranchisement.”

What many elections experts call the most important objective — making it easier to register to vote — has gained momentum as states have moved toward online registration. This year, Vermont, West Virginia, Connecticut and Alaska joined Oregon in approving automatic voter registration, in which residents are enrolled to vote whenever they interact with a government agency, unless they opt out.

But further expanding the rolls will be difficult, experts say, because registration has also become a partisan issue. Many Republicans are both ideologically and politically against a change that not only removes patriotic impetus to sign up to vote, but that they believe will help expand the Democratic base more than their own.

An article on Sunday about questions surrounding the presidential voting process described incorrectly the voters who supported Donald J. Trump. They accounted for barely a quarter of Americans eligible to vote, not of registered voters.

Correction:

Because of an editing error, a picture caption with an article on Sunday on the presidential voting process misidentified Phoenix-ville, Pa. It is a borough in Chester County, not a county.

Doris Burke contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: After Fraught Election, Questions Over the Impact of a Balky Voting Process. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe